Plato that rhetoric is flatter but I do not agree with his idea that knowledge is given or transcendental. Rather knowledge is produced and it is through this production that new kinds of innovation and creativity emerge. Also this illustrates the difference between Don Juan, who believes knowledge or his purpose is given, which is contrary to Jonas Wergeland, who produces knowledge through his encounters with previously famous persons. In the next passage I will describe how desire is production, not lack.
In Plato’s work The Symposium, which deals with speeches about Eros and passions, the idea of rhetoric presents itself again, especially the idea of desire as a lack. One of the reasons why The Symposium stands as a land mark in the oeuvre of Plato is not only caused by its theme and its beautiful style, but also due to the fact that Plato tells the purpose of Eros and life very explicitly: the actions of man are guided by the hope that its actions would live forever in the memory of man.
Plato writes “...; it is desire for immortal renown and glorious reputation such as theirs that is the incentive of all actions, and the better a man is, the stronger the incentive; he is in love with immortality” (The Symposium, 208bc). Immortality and the following fame can be reached in two ways, either by the physical act in between the sheets, which hopefully will produce babies, or through the creation of lasting works like the ones produced by poets and artist, or philosophers like Plato himself. Plato claims that we live life striving to become immortal in one way or another. This proposal, however, goes beyond the understanding of desire as lack, which we saw earlier. In Gorgias it was the rhetoricians who seduced their listeners through flatter and thereby made the listener desire something. In The Symposium Socrates learns that desire is life or life is desire. Desire is an expansion of life through Eros; either through some sort of creation (poet, artist, philosopher) or through transformation (the semen on the sheets). Such an understanding of desire is more similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s in Anti-Oedipus. If desire were the lack of a real object, we would say that the essence of desire is lack (or leak, like the jar), and this lack is what produces whatever fantasized object, which is also the reason to why we must live the life of a thief. As Deleuze and Guattari puts it: “.., whereas desire is regarded as what produces the fantasy and produces itself be detaching itself from the object, though at the same time it intensifies the lack by making it absolute: an ‘incurable insufficiency of being’, an ‘inability-to-be that is life itself.’”157 If desire is a lack as Plato believes, then this would actually mean that the world is missing something; there is an object (e.g. better working conditions, more challenging assignments) that desire feels a lack of. In The Symposium Plato implicitly writes that the human being always is in a state of lack: “The truth of the matter is this. No god is a lover of wisdom or desires to be wise, for he is wise already, and the same is true of other wise persons, if there be any such. Nor on the other hand do the ignorant love wisdom and desire to be wise, for the tiresome thing about ignorance is precisely this, that a man who possesses neither beauty nor goodness nor intelligence is perfectly well satisfied with himself, and no one who does not believe that he lacks a thing desires what de does not believe that he lacks” (The Symposium, 203d).
The wise does not desire, neither does the stupid. The first does not lack knowledge and the second is too stupid to realize he does. The important thing is that Plato actually has no distinction between the subject and the object, between producer and product. The wise produces the product he already is: knowledge and the same counts for the stupid. Desire becomes here an immanent principle, since producer-product is essentially one and the same, as we saw earlier in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of process. Nevertheless, Plato tells us that the one who does not desire because of his brilliant intellect or shining stupidity cannot be harmonic. I agree with Plato when he implies that being humble is a virtue. However, no one can legitimize that another person is in a state of lack (which I claim HRM-theory is doing when talking about motivation). Hopefully this will become clearer as we progress.
Desire does not lack or need. Rather need is derived from desire as a counter-product, and lack is a counter effect of desire. Lack is created, planned, and organized in and through the social production. Wergeland desires and therefore he expands the Norwegian dogmas about the people he portrays. By doing these portrays he creates a lack, which has a seducing effect. Production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. In other words, supply is not organized or planned by demand, but that demand is organized and controlled by supply. So the social production creates both a lack in a psychological sense and in an economic sense as scarcity.
Deleuze and Guattari claim that desire produces and its product is real and not a fantasized and missing object. The two of them write: “If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality… Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, ... Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it.”158
The traditional logic (e.g. the Platonic logic) of what desire can do forces us to choose between desire as either production or acquisition. From “the moment we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of a real object.”159 However, desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. If desire produces, its product is the real, which means that desire can only be productive in the real world (i.e. not any other metaphysical world). There is no outside, since we cannot distinguish desire from its object, or production from its product. Both
Plato and Deleuze and Guattari understand desire as something which enriches life, and therefore it is good (Spinoza). The difference is that moving towards something better does not necessarily indicate that the present situation is unbalanced as Plato claims, or that we move towards an absolute good.
The desiring-machine that Deleuze and Guattari speak about must not be understood as a concept of, or a metaphor, since it does not represent anything. Rather, it is a synthesis in accordance with three modes:160 The connective synthesis, which mobilizes libido as withdrawal energy from the whole;
the disjunctive synthesis, which mobilizes the Numen (creative energy) as detachment energy, and the conjunctive synthesis, which mobilizes Voluptas (pleasure, lust) as a residual energy.
These three modes make the process of desiring-production at once the production of production, the production of recording, and the production of consumption. The whole (or the real) itself is a product produced alongside other parts. Desire is not initiated by a specific thing or some specific operation but throughout a relation. Relations are a way of moving from place to place, a kind of wandering. Serres writes: “I wander. I let myself be led by fluctuations. I follow the relations and will soon regroup them, just as language regroups them [substantives] via prepositions.”161 Desire is a relational interference of the heterogenic fluidity of society. For this reason we cannot answer what desire is, but only sketch what it does and what it can.
There are certain similarities between capitalism and schizophrenia. In capitalism there is a relative deterritorialization in two specific forms: (1), money decoding everything (title, rank, profession…), and reducing everything to a flow of money; and (2), labor as a “free worker”, freeing the worker from physical and legal ties (i.e. slavery and serfdom). Although capitalism is a movement of deterritorializing flows, it is also a violent reterritorialization. “The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value.”162 We could for simplicity’s sake say that capitalism fosters a more restricted form of desire, because it works with a specific end (surplus value), which can turn out to be a never ending exploitation of the world. The schizophrenic desire, on the other hand, is an ongoing process of becoming reality.
Henry Ford became both famous and infamous when he doubled the wages of the Ford Motor Company’s workforce. This economical gesture did not make the workforce more mobile since the
wage were tied to the workplace. Furthermore, raising the wage also made his workforce spend more money, which made them even more dependent on their work. The immobility returns disguised as economical freedom.
How does desire work? Unlike psychoanalysis, and its equivalent capitalism with its three errors concerning desire: lack, law and signifier, the schizoanalysis is nomadic and polyvocal. Deleuze and Guattari exemplify this when stating that reading a text never is a scholarly exercise in search of what the signifier is, and what is signified. “Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring-machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force.”163 Literary style is when language no longer signifies things, or is defined by what it says, “but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode.”164 Literature is like schizophrenia: a process, not a goal; a production, not an expression.
Remember the six parameters in Ingeniøren image-survey, where the goal of the workers is defined by what they say, although what they can say is limited within certain categories. Instead of defining what is of interest beforehand, the workforce ought to have gotten the appropriate space to articulate what work does? The organization could use such statements as part of the organizational flow and not as a definitive law for what good work is. Desire is an aggregate of many different things. So the desire for work is a potpourri of the assignments, collegians, management etc. If the workforce believes or strives for challenging assignments, then it happens because the workforce behaves in a manner of “perseverance in being” (Spinoza). Perseverance means to become what the workforce already is qua its potential. A pursuit of interest. Furthermore, this counts for the organizations as well. Based on its habit the organization believes something and that something is what keeps it attractive. Desire is the desire to become or actualize itself, a life, an organization.
Deleuze and Guattari call this a schizophrenic revolution, which, in addition, is a shift away from the reducing trace of psychoanalysis and capitalism towards the including and continuing deterritorializing of the schizoanalysis. Instead of identifying oneself with the oedipal triangle (mummy-daddy-me), one could say: “yes that is me too, but I am also…, and…,” i.e., work as an aggregate of parameters. The Nietzschean subject is something that passes through a series of states:
“every name in history is I…”165 The schizophrenic as a nomad draws a new geography for the people yet to come. Desire is a standing transformation; everyone passes into the body of the other in the socius. Everyone retains his own singularity, and thereby avoids melting into a homogeneous
sameness. “We never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying” write Deleuze and Guattari.166
The practical problem of schizoanalysis, however, is to restore the syntheses of the unconscious to their immanent use. The unconscious does not mean anything; it constructs machines, which are machines of desire. The unconscious does not speak, it engineers, and it produces rather than express. What Deleuze and Guattari try to unfold through the schizoanalysis is the singular life as pure immanence. Life is neither dependent nor can it be reduced to a higher transcendental being (i.e. lack, law, and signifier). There is no higher order, only immanence, which also refers back to Spinoza’s understanding of the Good as something which becomes good, because we strive and desire it, i.e. produces it. It is an investment in the social, a breakthrough.
Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept body without organs as something which is non-productive, yet produced. A body without organs is a body without functions. It has blocked senses for which reason it cannot perceive or grasp anything. Nevertheless, the body without organs is an egg, which holds a potential. It is the limit of the socius.167
We might understand the concept better if we relate it to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and the character Humpty Dumpty, the egg. The egg is something that has not been born yet, but nevertheless is alive. Humpty Dumpty is alive; he can speak although he is just an egg. “When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be the master – that’s all”168
The body without organs is the limit of the socius qua being the limit of sensibility qua being the limit of our senses. We could also claim that the body without organs illustrates the absolute liberation from any legislative power, for example, Hobbes’ Leviathan who embodies the power and rationality of the state. Or in Rousseau’s The Social Contract where the multitude must be united in a single body called the sovereign which will ensure that no individual will get hurt because “it is impossible for a body to wish to hurt all of its members.”169 Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the concept is based on an inversion of what Rousseau and Hobbes seeks to accomplish: a body without organs symbolizes a society without references, segmentations or codifications – it is pure desire. But when each man must actualize himself without any role models, we might ask what our
senses are capable of. Deleuze writes: “A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence... it is made of virtualities, events, singularities.”170 What are we capable of? We become masters of the words we speak, when the language answers our needs. The body without organs, therefore, is a plane or surface to be produced or unscripted for every desire. Michel Serres would call it our ability to create a 1:1 world since whatever takes places implies the constitution of a body without organs. Serres writes: “I want to finish drawing this navigational map, this inventory – fluctuating and mobile… Note that this maritime chart, an ocean of possible routes, fluctuates and does not remain static like a map. Each route invents itself.”171 Each life is a singular essence. The body without organs, I believe, symbolizes society which is constantly composed around an intensive flux of desiring, striving and producing singularities.
The society means the shape that it is, like Humpty Dumpty, opposed to the transcendence of Plato.
Each person exists, but he has not yet achieved the form that is his destiny, which is why he constantly must be worthy of what happens to him. This accents the distinction between actualities of this world (i.e. Humpty Dumpty as an egg) from its potentials, or virtualities. Both the people and society are pure potential yet to be unfolded. The progression of the socius either ends or begins at the body without organs, “and there it either passes through the wall, opening onto the molecular elements where it becomes in actual fact what it was from the start: the schizophrenic process, the pure schizophrenic process of deterritorialization. Or it strikes the wall, rebound off it, and falls back into the most miserable arranged territorialities of the modern world as simulacra of the preceding planes.”172 This implies that a life as pure immanence is a creative energy, or the productive motor of all that exists, i.e. desire. Also it implies that ontology is a process which neither begins nor ends, but takes up speed in the middle. The molecular, the microphysics or intra-atomic phenomena can be related to the internal force (conatus) which made man strive and desire. In this molecular process man will actualize an already possible potential; whereas the molar, the statistical, and mass phenomena will arrange territories limiting what there is, e.g. ghettos. When Humpty Dumpty says that it is matter which is to be the master, then it is based on the fact that every order-word or slogan is a language-function within language. All discourse is indirect; it depends on the functionality in a given sociality. Or as Deleuze and Guattari says: “an order always and already concerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy.”173 In the beginning of this part I claimed that seduction was a weapon, but it depends on our immanent energy as the source of all creativity. If we have no bodily organs, then we cannot perceive anything. Without perception we cannot collide with life, we cannot create. Therefore, the limit of society is the non-organic body.
However, the molecular and the molar should not be understood as two concepts without any relations, since the molecular are themselves the investment of the large molar machines. Maybe it is a matter of perspective, whether you define (and reduce) the socius through statistical numbers (molar) such as birth-rate, profession, income, or, on the other hand, define it through love, creativity, and new forms of life. Deleuze and Guattari define the argument for schizophrenic:
“desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement – desiring-machines. The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and social production.”174 The socius is an assemblage, like a bazaar with many different shops (molar), shops which contain even more different things (molecular). Therefore it would be wrong to reduce the bazaar to either the mommy, the father, or oneself because there is always something else and more at play. This also emphasizes the need for an organization to understand itself as something which is a part of society, and not distinguished from it. Similar, the employee is not distinct from society, but is also a part of it. To make language answer the employee needs is to present the employee with an organizational frame, a space of opportunities where he can strive to become himself. To help the employee to get acquainted with the unknown is also a way for the organization to grow. When the employee achieves something, he also helps creating a wider organizational spaciousness incorporating new forms of thought. A wider organizational spaciousness opens up for attracting qualified labor from a broader and more diverse recruitment pool. The organizational body becomes organizing.
The challenge is not to reduce the heterogeneity to homogeneity, which is the reason why I urge for caution when using values as managerial instruments. There is always the possible re-coding, or reterritorialization with the molar chain, whereas the molecular chain continues deterritorializing the flows, and thereby passes through the signifying wall holding the codes. Although the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari might be a bit harsh to swallow for an organization, it ought to become more like a desiring-machine. What the concept tells us is that everything is possible, since everything is desire, machines, and production. In fact, what Deleuze and Guattari ask for is more deterritorialization, “one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you haven’t seen anything yet –“175 Imagine Bauman and Sennett’s resentment. Of course, we should not urge organizations to transform per se, but underline that it needs to include various qualities in order to improve. Organizations should dare and risk a little more, be open towards the difference in kind.
An employee says: “Even if I don’t approve of an assignment, I say ‘hurra’ because that is expected.
The thing is I’m not the kind of type saying ‘hurra’ whether the assignments are good or not. But I learn how to play along. Sometimes it seems like my leader lacks an understanding from what is different from her/his behavior.”176 Here the psycho- or the image-analysis is allowed being the director of bad conscience. Instead, it should let the unconscious relate to the Outside and breakthrough, actualize its singular lines of escape by becoming the master of the words it speak in order to make language answer its need.
Every investment is social. An organizational life expands as it actualizes its potential, by constituting an investment in the social field. This is a desiring life. What does desire do, and what does it produce? Desire lives, and thereby it produces more life to come.